There are a lot of SEO plugins for WordPress. "SEO for WordPress" has become a major catch phrase. Many companies now offer paid plugins which provide a lot of different options and possibilities how to further customize your site SEO to the tiniest details.

How much of it is really necessary or even helpful? Are the basic page title and meta description fields not enough? Should you pay up to $47/site/month for a plugin only to be able to set "noindex" for some of your categories? Will it help you to spend a week of sleepless nights learning what "noindex" is and when it might be helpful or are there other things you might do during that week which might do more to improve your rankings than "noindex".

Here's some alternative suggestions:

write the four or five great articles that you've been meaning to do for months

go out and comment up a storm on the most interesting weblogs in your sector with a link back to your site. You won't get much Google juice at point but you'll bring new visitors.

answer some questions on related forums to the point people trust you and visit your website for additional information

We believe that every site owner and almost every author on a site should be able to do the basic SEO optimization of his or her own site. This means the SEO plugin should be easy to use and have good default options, which won't put the site at risk. Some plugins risk seriously compromising your indexation in Google just by activating the plugin. In Foliovision's opinion, this is totally unacceptable. We believe in safe intelligent defaults. There's no reason the site owner should have to worry about his or her SEO plugin.

Hard to start using - no custom title or description fields until you turn them on.

No extra steps required.

Compatibility

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Option to migrate from All in One SEO Pack

Import function for All in One SEO Pack, HeadSpace2 and some other Yoast plugins.

Imports data from All in One SEO Pack

If you stop using Thesis, you loose your SEO data - conversion needed.

Support for All in One SEO Pack and Headspace2

Compatible with All in One SEO Pack.

Branding

HTML comment in header, ads on the options page

HTML comment in header

HTML comment in header with URL of the plugin website.

"The Latest From Yoast" on your dashboard, can be removed with Screen Options.

HTML comment in header.

Removed in the most expensive license.

Thesis Attribution link in the template - requires a bit of programming to be removed.

Big link in logo in the footer.php template.

No branding

All in One SEO Pack

Platinum SEO Pack

WordPress SEO by Yoast

wpSEO

Thesis SEO

WooThemes Daily Edition

FV Simpler SEO

Conclusion

Interface - The vertical space on websites is precious and it also applies to the WordPress post editing screens. Why some of these plugins use so huge interface boxes, that they took over nearly all of my 1680x1050 screen (Thesis is the worst, others just like to waste a lot of space on large padding)?

Compatibility - SEO functions should not be part of any template. What happens when you need to change your site design? You waste extra time on trying to move your existing SEO data from Thesis into some reasonable plugin.

Branding - Most of the plugins put in their branding in your site HTML code. I don't understand why all the SEO plugins have to be like this, I've never seen that anywhere else! Imagine that you have a site with 20 plugins and now each of them suddenly decides that it's going to put some HTML code in the header to let everybody know what you use this or that great plugin by Mr. XY.

Basic functionality

The basic purpose of a SEO plugin is to allow easy editing of all the extra information which gets indexed by search engines:

Manual entry for each post and frontpage (depends on actual WooTheme).

No support for custom post types.

Use categories and tags as keywords by default

Manual entry for each post is by default disabled

Conclusion

Title - most plugins require title rewrite enabled to start using the field for SEO title. Title rewrite is by default "on" in most of the plugins, so what happens when you don't want to use it and you are happy with you titles as they are without the plugin? You get no custom SEO titles, or you have to tweak the rewrite to not change the structure of your titles.

Desciptions - the only thing what really matters here is the hand-written description. You don't need to auto-generate that, as search engines will do so by themselves.

Noindex, nofollow and noarchive for each post, section, taxonomy and front page.

Noindex for each post and archive sections.

Nofollow for

Canonical link.

Noindex setting for archives and search.

Directory tags

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Noodp, noydir settings for the whole website.

Noodp and Noydir for each post and also for the whole website.

Noydir setting for the whole website.

Noodp, noydir settings for the whole website.

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Other features

Short title for pages in WP page menus

Lists SEO fields on WP-admin posts listing

301 redirection for the post when extension has been removed.

Optional <head> section clean up

Remove category prefix function.

XML sitemap generator.

Built-in breadcrumbs

Extra links back to your website in your RSS feeds.

.htaccess editing

SERP preview

Remove category prefix option

Extensive settings of auto-generated keywords

301 Redirect for the post URL

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Short title for pages in WP page menus

SERP preview

Conclusion

Thesis offers some crazy anti-SEO options, like making sure your front page won't get indexed. That's really a dangerous function, imagine somebody turns it on by mistake and you find out about it few months later. Your search engine rankings would probably be way lower than they used to be. If somebody is doing really a special site which needs to have noindex on front page, surely he can do it without Thesis.

WordPress SEO by Yoast offers a nice SERP preview feature, but it doesn't respect the character limits on title and description. It also has many different features, perhaps more than a SEO plugin should handle. I imagine it's hard to switch to another plugin later is you already like the provided breadcrumbs or XML sitemaps.

Miscellaneous

Here's little extra from our experience. Reasonable Default Options are one of the reasons why we started our own SEO plugin. We were not happy to tweak the settings (or plugin files) on each site over and over again.

Miscellaneous

All in One SEO Pack

Platinum SEO Pack

WordPress SEO

wpSEO

Thesis (built-in SEO functions)

Woothemes

FV Simpler SEO

Support

Non-responsive developer (not willing to add features even after donation)

Support provided via website.

Quick and responsive, using the WP.org forums.

Paid support

Customer support forum

Customer support forum

Support provided via website, on-site troubleshooting for a small donation

Monthly updates when new features are requested

Default options

Changes your titles right after installing.

Noindex on by default on all archives, except for tag archives.

Changes your titles right after installing.

Noindex on by default on search and monthly archives.

Changes your titles right after installing.

Changes your titles right after installing.

Noindex on by default on all archives.

Noindex and nofollow on by default on all archives except for category pages.

Noindex and nofollow on by default on all archives except for category pages.

Puts nofollow on your posts!

Noindex on by default on search pages.

Bugs we noticed

Checking "I enjoy this plugin and have made a donation" won't remove the ads or HTML comment from header.

Title rewrite doesn't work in WP 3.1.

Auto-redirect loops when post slug is a single digit or two digits.

Auto-redirects takes the request string and passes it to SQL without proper escape. Possibly a security hole!

Creates around 40 options in wp_options table.

Titles broken in fresh new WP 3.1.1 with Twenty ten template - fixed by "Force rewrite titles" in the options.

Conclusion

Default options - When you install a SEO plugin, make sure you check how the default options change your titles. With FV Simpler SEO, you don't have to beafraid, as there is no change unless you rewrite the title yourself.

Watch out for WordPress SEO, it relies on the template to use the most correct function to display the meta title tag, which is not the case of the standard WordPress template (it uses some extra echo statements in the HTML of title tag). However - the plugin should be able to handle that without destroying the titles in the first place.

WooThemes Daily Edition put's nofollow into header of your posts by deafault. This can be turned into follow in options or changed for individual posts (not working on our test site with clean fresh WP 3.1.1.) We recently had a client install a WooTheme and deindex his site. Needless to say we helped him out of the bind but he was unnecessarily freaked out. Bad choice Woo. But then based on hard experience we don't like Woo Themes or most other commercial WordPress themes at all.

Which one is the best?

Depends. If you like to play around with WordPress and you are interested in the most finest SEO tweaks, then check out WordPress SEO by Yoast. If you are a writer, or you don't want to worry about your SEO plugin deindexing you by accident, then our FV Simpler SEO is the safest and easiest to use by far.

If you think otherwise or want to recommend another plugin, we'd love to hear what you like about the other plugin and why. If you have any suggestions on how to improve FV Simpler SEO, let us know.

Martin graduated as an engineer in Computer Science from Slovak Technical University in Bratislava. He grew up in Liptovský Mikuláš in northern Slovakia next to the beautiful Tatra mountains. He is the developer behind our FV Player.

Just one minor remark:
The WooThemes built-in SEO functionality currently does not support custom title, meta description and meta keywords for the front page. Please revise the relevant comparison table accordingly.

Interesting post and I like lots of your points – I think you should make it clearer from the start that one of them is your plugin though, but if your points are correct then the comparisons are still valid.

One area I can’t get a handle on is how SEO plugins affect performance, eg: dB enquiries – I know that Yoast is keen on dB optimizing – his plugin at start out adds at least 4 (All in one and yours are 2 a piece – which presumably is the minimum – meta tags and descriptions?). Not a lot compared to some, but that’s 30% more than my basic WP install. Not an issue at outset, but if traffic grows..

I always think the size of the plugin is a good indicator of complexity too – it weighs in at almost 1Mb zipped! This surely will also have some affect on load times?

I’m no expert but I was always of the opinion that the content was the most important thing.

I’m reviewing SEO plugins for a few WP sites so will definitely check it out as some of them do seem a bit too complicated for what they do.

100% agree with your comments regarding why WP devs feel they need to add their own branding to WordPress sites using HTML code.

If the plugin license allows we always try and filter out the redundant code using a well placed filter or add/remove action hook in our themes functions.php

Until recently our recommendation was All In One SEO. We recently went back and checked out WordPress SEO by Yoast and was presently surprised. It does everything All In One SEO does and then some. Well recommended!

My question is, would activating any of these plugins automatically affect a post? In your article you mention something about rewriting which is obviously unwanted if one is not specifically looking to rewrite the title/metadata.

I suppose I just would like to know if you can have the plugin activated and use it on a per-case basis instead of having it rewriting everything. I am particularly interested in your plugin as well as Platinum and Yoast.

our plugin was designed to not change anything when activated. We don’t put on any noindex attributes on any archives by default, except for search. We only use categories and tags for meta keywords field by default.

See the “Miscellaneous” table above for comparison with other plugins.

I’ve been using the All in One SEO plugin for a while with both our and client sites, and it’s pretty good – I’m no SEO expert but our google rankings are definitely going the right way.

Just one question – you mentioned that Google doesn’t always use the meta descriptions. Why the hell not (after all, that’s what they’re there for right, to give the searcher a helpful summary of content) and is there anything I can do to “encourage” google to use them? I’ve noticed random, unhelpful excerpts coming up for some of our search terms and think it looks really unprofessional!

@Kate, if a page ranks for a given keyword or keyword phrase, and the keyword is not included in the meta description – only in your on-page content – then in this scenario Google will over-ride your meta description and grab a snippet of the on-page copy, including the keyword(s).

So, whilst there is some debate as to whether meta descriptions directly influence rankings nowadays, it can be worth getting the page’s primary keywords in the meta description. As well as increasing the likelihood that your meta description gets used for the SERP, rather than a random truncated snippet, this has the added benefit that the keywords entered in the user’s search (and increasingly, closely related synonyms) are highlighted in bold, potentially helping your listing to stand out from the crowd.

Thanks for the information! I’d been using All-in-one SEO Pack and recently installed a theme from Woo Themes, so wasn’t sure whether to keep using the plugin or go with the options provided by Woo. This comparison was very useful!

As a longtime All-in-One SEO Pack user, I’ve now switched to FV Simpler CEO and am very happy with the product. One of the complaints about AIO is that it’s bloated and contains too many lines of code. Is FV significantly smaller?

All in One SEO Pack is bigger than FV Simpler SEO, but the difference is not so big. Bigger difference is in the user interface – All in One SEO Pack puts ads into WP admin interface and plugin author name into your site source HTML. FV Simpler SEO won’t do this to your site.

While FV Simpler SEO uses the same database table as All in One (for cross-compatibility), the code base is completely different. Our code is safer and faster (personally checked by Mark Jaquith for any cross-site scripting vulnerabilities).

For the end user three main advantages:

* no advertising in source code
* intelligent defaults so you get safe SEO on activation
* attractive and informative Google preview

Thank you for the comparison. I’m a long-time user of platinum seo, installed in many WP websites. Went to install on my newest site to find out it no longer appears as a recommended plugin via WP (“not updated in two years”).

I LOVE simpler, less vertical clutter (for SEO newbies) and non-branding of FV (Yoast is obviously brilliant, but with a blindspot to humility).

BUT… really miss the ability to click a “no index, no follow” checkbox while editing a post (why I chose platinum SEO in the past). Any workaround or possibly a new “option” feature to add post-specific noindex/nofollow in store for you guys?

Thank you for your articles and comments.
You made me realize something: I actually don’t need any SEO plugin !
Except using extra ressource and putting meta data that Google nows is worthless, I don’t see the point.
So I’ll keep writing my articles manually with chosen permalink, category, and tag for each post as any good writer should do and I’m sure that’s enough even if plugin developpers will loose a link from my site…

You do need a good meta-description and WordPress does not provide meta-description natively. Which is why we created Simpler SEO. So that clients could improve their SEO without taking stupid risks or making their eyeballs bleed over endless time wasting SEO software documentation.